The Pirate Bay is a symbol for peer-to-peer file sharing around the world, as one of the longest-running - and still one of the most popular - destinations for those searching for shared content. But it is also one of the most heavily censored sites on the web, thanks largely to the efforts of the entertainment industries, who have made it their mission to do all that they can to prevent users from using it to share movies, videos, TV shows, music, games and other content.

For these copyright holders, a major victory in their continuing campaign against The Pirate Bay was won in early 2012, when ISPs in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom were issued court orders to begin blocking the site. Other countries, such as India, have also implemented their own bans, but the site has managed to work around these blockades.

In 2012, The Pirate Bay said that it had seen a sizeable increase in UK traffic after ISPs there began to block the site. It seems that wasn't a one-off occurrence, as TorrentFreak reports that traffic to the site has actually doubled since bans around the world came into effect.

The Pirate Bay shared details of its growth, but did not disclose exact user or traffic figures - although it is believed to get 'hundreds of millions' of pageviews each month. However, it did say that around 9 percent of its traffic comes from visitors using a proxy to access the site, with roughly one third of all traffic to the site coming from the United States.

The continued growth of The Pirate Bay, despite clumsy attempts to block access to it, suggests that the entertainment industries' efforts to kill piracy through censorship are not succeeding. More and more users are connecting to the web every year, and with each attempt to block high-profile sites like The Pirate Bay - and each failure to do so - awareness of P2P file sharing only increases, effectively paving the way for further growth in the number of users sharing copyrighted content.